ROKA: A software development methodology for industrial automation.

The industry invests great amounts of resources in automation and maintenance systems. To encourage more efficient systems a design of a methodology is needed, it must work for software development in industrial automation processes. To obtain guidelines to design such a methodology, a literature review was performed. As a result, a methodology was developed based on good practices and lessons learned from Software Engineering. It was made for the development of advanced structured software in industrial automation systems. Through user experiences analysis a positive validation was obtained, it confirms that a methodology for mechatronic and automation systems is necessary, also it is an almost unknown area, additionally, some observations about how to teach the methodology were also obtained.